Villanelle Resources
… crawling through the poetry guidebooks so you don't have to …
Surprisingly, there is a large selection of websites devoted to the villanelle. True, most of them contain the exact same examples of good villanelles (you'd think besides Dylan Thomas there were only four other villanelle-poets in the whole, wide world: W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and Oscar Wilde, for the amount their poems get referenced) but if you have patience to re-read the same explanations as to what the rules of villanelle writing are, there are some interesting gems hidden here and there.
Start with the The Academy of American Poets; then move onto BellaOnline. They have a humorous and interesting guide to writing villanelles. Several professors have set up websites to explain to students what a villanelle is; Damon McLaughlin, Conrad Geller and Alberto Rios are all worth checking out.
But, you ask, are there other villanelles in the world worth reading? I recommend looking at Peter Schaeffer's minimalist villanelle, One Drunken Night, Wendy Cope's Reading Scheme and Donald Justice's Villanelle At Sundown.